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The Gopher Puck Live Podcast is the GPL Podcast, sponsored by Vintage Minnesota Hockey, your exclusive source for throwback Minnesota jerseys.
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Visit vintagemnhockey.com.
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Now, here's Hammy, Vego, and your host, Jupiter.
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Good evening, and welcome to The GPL Podcast, episode number 132.
0:48
Well, it's gonna be a short episode tonight because we've got absolutely nothing to talk about.
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Nothing, nothing has happened in the last month, last week, last day.
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We'll keep it short, huh guys?
1:04
Holy cow, we had a lot of happen since we've been on.
1:08
We've had a coaching change, we've had some players leave, we had Minnesota not make the tournament after they were like 99% in.
1:16
We could do a podcast, because my internet completely failed for a week.
1:19
Just a lot of stuff going on, Veegs.
1:22
Where in the heck do we start?
1:25
I think we have to start with the new coach.
1:29
That's something that hasn't happened in 19 years.
1:33
Yeah, I would say so.
1:35
The Don is out, resigned, retired, whatever you want to call it, last week.
1:41
He said it was time, but he said actually during his news conference, after those six games that only one of them they had to win, all happened, he said it was a sign for him to go.
1:54
I'm guessing he might have decided before that.
1:57
But who really knows what's in his head, do we?
2:01
Yeah, it's hard to know.
2:03
Serratore was telling a story that he finally gave in and gave his terms of resignation after the way the tournament went out on the last week on the conference championships.
2:15
And you could just kind of tell this year that he wasn't in it for the long haul.
2:20
He was turning over the scheduling to Gensel.
2:23
He was turning over media availability to Gensel to Bell.
2:27
And you could tell he was just kind of stepping away a little bit from some of the things he'd usually had his hands on.
2:32
Even the last couple of years, he'd been giving Grant Patoni more opportunities to coach the power play.
2:39
He brought on Ben Gordon and the staff to try to get him ready to be a coach somewhere.
2:43
So you could just kind of sense that all these things were coming to a head here.
2:46
And that was kind of the last straw when he missed the tournament.
2:51
Hammey, 19 years as a coach, two national championships, 14 banners, whether it's a playoff banner, a regular season banner in the WCHA Big Ten, we have not been happy with him the past few years, but his history here will be at the top or not, or maybe right there with Herb Brooks.
3:11
It's just the reality.
3:13
He was an excellent coach for a long time.
3:17
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
3:18
You can't hold a lot against him.
3:20
I mean, I know that we expected a little bit more from a national title perspective after, you know, rolling through those two years back to back.
3:28
And I don't think anybody would have predicted that 15 years later that we wouldn't have added to that number.
3:35
But certainly when you look at the wins and the losses, the league titles, the players that have come through the program, all those kinds of things have been very positive.
3:48
He's obviously had a pretty clean, cleanly run team.
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So I mean, really everything that you could really expect out of a coach, you know, he's delivered on.
3:59
I mean, like I said, we wanted a little bit more from the national title perspective, but that's just the way it goes.
4:04
And it's not so bad getting that much time into your career and getting a couple national titles.
4:10
That's a pretty good deal.
4:11
Now, Veegs, typically, you know, we haven't seen the real Don.
4:15
He's always been very reserved, always to himself, very professional and just a coach.
4:21
But in the last few days, you know, he was on Beyond the Pond with Johnny Pole and Jordan Leopold.
4:27
And it seems like the Don that a lot of his friends know and his family knew kind of came out in some of that stuff.
4:32
You know, some of the things he didn't show when he was a coach, came out in the last few days.
4:37
And a lot of people have been saying, you know, where did we, why didn't we see that before?
4:44
But boy, a lot of people have been saying to me, geez, he's a lot more likable than we thought.
4:50
And it's maybe just because he had that coach facade just going for almost 20 years.
4:56
It's almost like he always has his game face on.
4:59
If you go to his availability and you listen to his radio show and you hear making these appearances, you know, he rehearses what he's going to say in all these situations.
5:09
It's almost like you hear the same speech every time when you see him in all these opportunities.
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And I think he's just so dialed in about what to present to the public that he's always concerned about how he sounds and what he says because he takes so much criticism from the public and Gopher fans over the last couple of years.
5:28
And now that he's no longer the head coach, he can just kind of let it fly and make fun of Troy Riddle's nightlife.
5:35
It's things like that that I think give a coach a little bit more slack with fans.
5:41
And sometimes when you're so buttoned up, now you don't get that.
5:45
And I think it's been weighing on him trying to go out with a bang.
5:51
And to have it go the way it did is just too bad.
5:57
But he's letting loose now and we get to see him for another year because he's going to get paid.
6:02
Yeah, well, well, Hammy, I don't know if you heard the Beyond the Pond the other day this past Saturday.
6:06
But another thing that the Don did talk about as well is like he actually kind of called out the you for their ticket prices.
6:15
You know, maybe something we haven't heard in a while when he when he distinctly talked about how people can go to Wisconsin and pay half the cost that at Mariucci, he says it's a big issue.
6:24
We've been talking about it here for years.
6:26
But to finally hear it from the Don himself is it's kind of a big deal.
6:32
I just wish it would have happened a long time ago.
6:34
Yeah.
6:34
I mean, I don't blame him.
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It's kind of a tough position to be in when you're the coach because you are talking essentially about your bosses and their decisions.
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And I think we can all understand that you don't tend to criticize your boss too publicly.
6:51
Even, you know, you just don't really tend to do that.
6:53
So I understand why he didn't do it.
6:55
It's certainly nice to hear him say it after the fact.
6:59
It was kind of nice to hear, you know, Coyle essentially admit to as much that, you know, that maybe they have kind of overdone it.
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And so I think that that's something that should make some of the fans good.
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I mean, feel good about it.
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Maybe they'll address it.
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We have yet to see any action on it, of course.
7:15
But hopefully the fact that they're acknowledging these things will lead to some changes that, like you said, we've been talking about for a little while.
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We can only hope so.
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Veegs, you know, like I said, that stuff when he was on with Johnny and Jordan, it was good stuff.
7:32
And it wasn't just, you know, ripping the ticket prices.
7:35
It was kind of just, you know, it was almost like he had some relief going, like he could open up himself a little bit, like he couldn't do before.
7:44
Yeah, it definitely feels like he's got the pressure taken away because there's always a part of this fan base that was never going to get behind him.
7:52
Even when they had success, they just went quiet.
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But, you know, when they're not doing well, they sure come out and they can be pretty local, as we've seen.
8:01
So, you know, he's probably going to be more lax and push coil to drop ticket prices and to make that a little bit easier for fans to reengage at the program.
8:10
Because I don't think we're going to hear that from Bob Motzko in all his introductory press conferences.
8:17
No.
8:18
Well, you know, before we get to Bob, you guys have any more thoughts on the Don?
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You know, the only thing I would just kind of reiterate kind of what you guys were already talking about, if we had seen that side of him more often, I really believe that fans would have, you know, cut him a lot more slack.
8:40
I'm not saying that anything would have changed.
8:44
I think you mentioned that inside the people, they have a little bit more forgiveness in them if things don't quite go the way that they want.
8:49
But if you kind of give them that robotic, you know, coach speak, and you don't really show that side of you, fans kind of tire of that.
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So I think that if there's anything that, if I was a coach, you know, looking at that situation, the thing I would learn from that is to really not be afraid to kind of show some of your more personal side.
9:11
You don't have to give everybody the details, but you know, show enough of that where you have that kind of human element to you.
9:18
Well, I was on board with the coach, Guentzel being the next coach at Minnesota.
9:25
That didn't happen.
9:27
You know, I guess I'm fine with Bob Motzko.
9:31
But Hammeh, you look at somebody like Guentzel who has been with this program for a long time, much longer than the Don.
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And you know, he went away for a year and a half or whatever, he was gone.
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But this guy bleeds maroon and gold.
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He cares about this program more than probably anybody else over there.
9:50
And it's the last time we're going to see him behind the bench.
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I mean, I don't think he's going to come on.
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I don't think he's going to be involved anymore.
9:59
Is it a slight?
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I mean, what do you think about Guentzel not really getting a chance here after being here for so long?
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We could probably spend 15, 20 minutes on this one alone.
10:12
You know, I don't even know exactly where to start other than I think the thing that kind of bothers me, it's not even bothers, it disheartens me is that when I watched people talk about the coaching situation in the last week, it made me sad to see people kind of hold his loyalty against him in a sense, because he's a really good coach and he's had opportunities to go elsewhere.
10:41
He was a head coach in the USHL before he came to the U and he was successful there.
10:47
He's got a tremendous amount of respect from players he's coached and alums and all these things that you really want to check the box on, and when you see people say oh well, he's just like Lucia and he's not going to be different.
11:07
It's like you're going to have your own thoughts when you're an assistant coach but you're not going to undermine the head coach.
11:14
You might give your opinions but you have to execute what the head coach wants and Mike Guentzel was not going to just be another Don Lucia.
11:21
He had his own thoughts and it's just disheartening to me when I saw people kind of criticize him especially in the sports where we're always lauding athletes who play with one team for their whole career or take the hometown discount to stick around.
11:38
And here we have a guy who was loyal and didn't try to just let his personal ambition lead him to some other place and he was loyal and people kind of held it against him and I don't know if it was held against him with the decision makers but it was kind of sad for me to see that.
11:54
Well, one thing about Guentzel Veegs is that when he did do media availability either before or after game or if you ever got a chance to talk to him, he was a different guy than Don.
12:05
He would tell you straight up what was going on and there was no BS with Mike.
12:11
Yeah, with Don it's always feeling like it's something rehearsed but with Guentzel it's honesty and how he feels and I think that's one of the things that the players respected about him.
12:22
He wasn't going to BS you when he benched you.
12:24
He wasn't going to BS you when he took away your ice time.
12:27
He was going to tell you to your face what was going on and he could show you on video if he wanted and he's a real honest guy and I think that kind of backfired on him here with this committee that sounds like was held to help decide the head coaching job.
12:45
It's too bad because he did pass up a lot of opportunities and he's probably thinking to himself tonight, what if I had taken one of those jobs and had been a head coach for a couple of years?
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Would I be in a better spot to be the head coach?
13:00
Even though it's not what he really wanted to do, he wanted to be at Minnesota the whole time.
13:06
It's too bad for him to see that happen.
13:09
Go ahead.
13:10
Well, what I was going to say is, and I'm not going to go into details about it, but I talked to Coach Guentzel for over an hour last week.
13:19
And that entire conversation, there wasn't one time where he talked about himself ever.
13:27
And the entire conversation, it was always about the program and his feelings on things and how he felt, you know, things could be tweaked and whatever.
13:39
He never wants, and he, it was like he was saying it, even though he knew he might not be around for it.
13:48
That's the kind of person that we're talking about.
13:50
He thinks about gopher hockey and wanting it to be the best it could be.
13:55
And I just don't know that people understand that.
13:59
And that's kind of what saddens me.
14:01
You know, when I see some critiques of him, I just feel like they don't get that.
14:05
Well, I always felt that he was very personal with a lot of people.
14:09
He was personal with, you know, me a few times.
14:11
I remember being between the benches, and we won't go into the swear thing he did once, but just an amazing play happened.
14:20
The Gophers get a goal, and Guentzel is three feet away from me.
14:24
And he looks at me, he goes, did you get that?
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As if, did I get the photo of the shot of the goal and whatnot?
14:29
And it's like he took time right after scoring the goal to look at me and say, hey, did you get that?
14:34
He's very personable.
14:36
And there was another time during the Mary G Classic when Northeastern was here where he was, you know, he was at one of the hotel rooms with a bunch of people along with the Northeastern coach.
14:46
And he's just very personable.
14:48
It's one thing we never saw from the Don because we didn't know the Don.
14:51
But Guentzel, you could come up and talk to you about anything.
14:55
And if it was hockey or not hockey, he was just a very personal guy.
14:58
And I'm personally going to miss having him around.
15:03
But that's just the way things go sometimes, you know.
15:05
Motzko is the big name now.
15:10
I'm almost thinking we should have gone a little younger, maybe not Potomac, but I don't know, maybe Motzko is only a short term thing.
15:18
I don't know.
15:20
But hats off to you, Mike Guentzel, because you have been the heart of the program through the Booger and the Don.
15:27
And he will definitely be missed.
15:30
I hope he doesn't, you know, we don't stop seeing him around here.
15:34
You know, Big Ten could go to St.
15:35
Cloud if he wanted to, I guess, unless the St.
15:37
Cloud assistant takes the job.
15:41
Yeah, it's hard to know.
15:42
You look around candidates as we've done for this gopher job.
15:46
And, you know, you think he'd be right up there with Greg Brown from BC and Ben Barr from UMass, his top assistants looking for jobs.
15:56
You know, St.
15:56
Cloud Gibbons has already said that he's going to apply for that job.
16:00
And it's going to be up to Guentzel, I think, whether or not he wants to keep coaching or I know he could always work with Motzko.
16:07
You never know.
16:09
A couple of cryptic tweets today out of his account, but we'll see.
16:16
Well, I guess that does lead us all to Bob Motzko, the new coach now taking over.
16:21
Just announced today he's going to have a press conference on Thursday at 1 p.m.
16:29
I'm going to try to get to that.
16:30
I'm not sure if I can get down there, but I'd like to.
16:32
At least we have a little more notice this time than we did when the Don quit.
16:37
Been at St.
16:37
Cloud for 13, 14 years or something along those lines.
16:41
Was an assistant here at Minnesota during the championship years.
16:46
Hammey, you usually have the alumni complaining, oh, he's not a Minnesota man, blah, blah, blah.
16:52
But I think the fact that he was already here and he was part of putting those national championship teams together that I don't think the alumni really have a lot to bitch about this time.
17:03
Yeah, well, you know how the alumni don't have something to bitch about probably anyways.
17:07
Yeah, but I'm saying, he was here, he helped build those teams.
17:12
He was here cheering for, I mean, he was a Minnesota guy when he was on the bench here.
17:16
So it's not like they're bringing in a complete outsider.
17:21
No, I may agree and I don't want anybody to take my comments about Coach Guentzel to mean that I don't support the Coach Motzko.
17:29
I mean, look, I'm not in on the interviews.
17:31
I don't know how each man presented their vision of the future for Gopher Hockey.
17:36
And so I'm not here to say anything beyond that, but I certainly support our new coach and I want him to do awesome.
17:44
And I believe that he has certainly a track record that's pretty good.
17:49
Obviously, like I brought up in Twitter last week, it would be interesting to see how forgiving and how accepting Gopher fans would be if Coach Motzko had done that at the U where he's a one seed two of the last three years and his team gets knocked out by a four seed this year being the lowest seed they got knocked out by.
18:13
We saw Lucia get criticized quite a bit for the one and done stuff and whatever.
18:17
So it'll be interesting.
18:19
But I certainly think that he's going to bring a style of hockey that should be exciting.
18:23
I think we all know he's a pretty offensive minded coach.
18:27
I think because he's offensive minded, we do need somebody on the staff that has a very good defensive mind and his own right.
18:34
So that's kind of why, you know, if I had my biggest wish, it'd be that Coach Guentzel would decide to stay and be a part of that.
18:42
But I have no clue what he's going to do in that regard.
18:46
But I'm excited about what the future holds.
18:48
And I think he'll be a good addition to our program.
18:51
Veegs, initial thoughts on Mr.
18:53
Bob Motzko taking over.
18:55
It's all timing when it comes to this coaching job turnover.
18:59
True.
19:00
If this would have been after the Gophers had lost in Union in the National Championship game, sure as you can bet, Guentzel would have been the coach in waiting.
19:11
If it would have been last year when St.
19:12
Cloud misses the tournament, I don't know if Bob Motzko gets the job, but he gets it.
19:19
And he plays up and down hockey.
19:21
He's coached on the Olympic Sheet at the Herbrooke Center.
19:24
So he's used to that.
19:26
He's used to taking a team that's used to playing on Olympic Sheet and taking it to NHL size ranks.
19:31
And we're still a couple of years from doing the ice sheet, shrink at Mariucci, but he's a good coach.
19:38
If you're looking at some of the top coaches in college hockey, he's on that list.
19:43
There's a reason why USA Hockey had him do the World Juniors back to back.
19:47
He's been Coach of the Year in the NCHC, which has been kind of the premier conference in college hockey the last couple of years.
19:55
And I think he gets almost bulletproof for not being an alum because of being on the staff when they won the national titles.
20:03
And because he's such a Minnesota guy, he's part of that Herb Brooks coaching tree.
20:08
He wanted to be on that staff and got the opportunity to do it.
20:11
So he's an exciting hire.
20:15
I think having the committee of people who have seen what happens when the alumni don't support their coach, they're going to really try to rally them and get on the same page.
20:26
So he gets more support than the last coach because you can see how damaging that can get.
20:31
Yeah, Hammy, regardless how people feel about Lucia, the alumni have just not been happy.
20:37
The donors haven't been happy for years now.
20:40
Don's going to turn to finishing what he's starting.
20:44
They got the locker room all done.
20:45
They still need to do the weight room.
20:46
They need to make other changes, club room, obviously eventually the rink size.
20:52
So the Don is going to stay on for that.
20:54
I don't know how successful he's going to be with it.
20:57
I almost think it would be better if it was Guentzel doing that.
21:03
Yeah, it'll be interesting, but maybe the fact that he's not in that role anymore, maybe that'll make him a little bit more acceptable to some of these alums.
21:16
I don't know.
21:17
I mean, I don't know how badly some of those relationships had been damaged.
21:22
Just because he was the head coach, maybe it'll be a little different now that he's not the head coach.
21:26
But we'll see.
21:28
We've already seen how his personality has changed since he's no longer the head coach.
21:32
I mean, it's probably going to be a lot easier for him going forward.
21:39
He wants to know who got interviewed.
21:42
I want to say Luis said it was like four guys.
21:46
Obviously, we've got Motzko, we've got Guentzel, Patoni.
21:50
You think that fourth guy might have been Staubber?
21:53
What I don't know 100 percent.
21:56
I've heard that Tom Ward was potentially interviewed, but I don't know that 100 percent.
22:04
So I don't want to go on record saying that's absolutely the case.
22:08
But I did hear that.
22:10
Vegas, is there a good case for some of those other guys?
22:12
We had Tom Ward who has been on the staff here years ago.
22:18
Staubber, in the magazine you write for sometimes was a Minnesota Hockey, really wanted the job as well.
22:27
Well, I think those guys are candidates to be coaches somewhere.
22:31
But I think the Gopher job is such a unique job in college hockey.
22:35
It's not just X's and O's.
22:37
It's not just developing talent.
22:40
You've got so many different things to deal with when you coach at Minnesota.
22:44
You've got so many early commitments.
22:46
You've got so many early departures like Casey Mittelstadt and Ryan Lindgren.
22:51
You've got other guys who might be looking to leave.
22:53
So you've got to manage your roster.
22:55
You've got to manage kids who don't want to play junior hockey.
22:58
They want to come right to college hockey.
22:59
So you've got to figure that out.
23:01
You've got GMs who criticize how well you're developing their draft picks.
23:08
And then you have this fundraising issue that's going to be a major issue for them.
23:13
They need to raise a little over $10 million to pay for the weight room, for the M Club, for Shrinking the Ice.
23:20
And they only have about 500,000 of that raise.
23:24
And they've been trying to do this for years.
23:27
And it took them a long time to get the locker room money in place.
23:31
So there's a lot of complications in the job.
23:33
And I don't think any of these guys can be a legitimate candidate unless they're willing to be able to take that on and have experience with how to handle it.
23:42
And I think that's very few people.
23:44
And I think Bob Motzko is one of those people who can handle it.
23:47
I think Guentzel would have been good at it too.
23:49
But I don't think it's a very long list of people who are qualified for the job.
23:56
Now, Hammeh, I think one of the big questions is how is this going to affect the current recruits that have committed to both Minnesota and St.
24:05
Cloud?
24:05
I mean, we have players that have signed national letters of intent.
24:09
They're probably still going to stick with that.
24:10
But is this something where we could lose some of these guys who agreed to come here under Don or maybe some St.
24:19
Cloud guys who agreed to go there, maybe come here?
24:23
There's a lot of fluidity to this.
24:26
What do you think could happen here?
24:28
Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting.
24:30
I think that when you're a new coach coming in, you have the perfect opportunity to kind of get rid of or cull whatever word you want to use, some of the underperforming recruits that are in your pipeline.
24:44
And certainly, there's a few situations in the Gopher pipeline right now that you would say, hmm, you know, that might be an opportunity to move on from that player.
24:53
Because let's face it, the guy that they committed to isn't there.
24:57
And the new guy can say, hey, look, I have a vision for what I want.
25:01
And I'm sorry, but you just don't really fit that vision.
25:05
You know, and they can't, it's like you kind of can hold against the school, but you can't really hold against the coach.
25:11
So it's kind of that gray area.
25:13
So I think that there's a chance that there might be a few guys that we move on from and not necessarily bring in.
25:20
But I think that looking at, especially over the last year or so, I think that it's been really strong and recruiting pipeline for the Gophers.
25:30
And I highly doubt that Motzko is going to come in and say, oh yeah, I don't want any of those guys.
25:35
I'm sure that the majority of them are going to maintain a commitment to the U, but there might be a few that he does cut.
25:42
And then on the flip side, I'm sure there might be a couple of guys that he looks at and says, yeah, I'm sure that they would want to follow me here.
25:50
Maybe I'll ask them.
25:53
I don't know.
25:54
I don't know how he's going to handle that part of it.
25:56
I remember when Lucia came, Matt Demarque had committed to Colorado College, and he decided to come follow Lucia to the U.
26:06
So it's not exactly unheard of to see something like that happen.
26:11
Well, Veegs, one of the things that we heard the Don talk about on Saturday was he would love for this gentleman's agreement to go bye-bye.
26:19
He even said the new coach should come in and say, I'm not going to go by these rules anymore.
26:24
I'm just going to, if they don't have a national letter of intent signed, I'm going to go recruit them.
26:31
You think this is something Moscow is going to do or you think it's going to be keep it on?
26:37
Well, I think Moscow liked the idea of a gentleman's agreement long ago, but it doesn't apply anymore.
26:45
These kids are making decisions before they knew who their head coach is going to be.
26:50
Kids making decisions before they know what the playing time looks like.
26:54
When I talked to Motzko at the NCHC media day, he said, as a parent of two boys, I don't need a rule to stop my kids from doing what they may or may not want to do.
27:04
I think it's pretty clear that while he hasn't had a lot of issues with the gentleman's agreement, there's no rules other than the national letter of intent.
27:14
That's the only thing that the NCAA recognizes.
27:17
They don't recognize verbals.
27:18
It's obvious that coaches don't either.
27:21
St.
27:21
Cloud last one of their big recruits to Denver this year.
27:25
That may or may not have started an argument between him and Jim Montgomery.
27:32
That Jim Montgomery said was about Miller Lite.
27:34
Tastes great.
27:34
Less filling.
27:35
But I'm pretty sure they were decommitting from St.
27:39
Cloud for Denver.
27:40
I think there's a hole in the blue line right now with Ryan Lindgren going pro.
27:46
A lot of the commits that Lucia had lined up are younger, and I don't think you want to be rushing these kids in.
27:54
St.
27:54
Cloud's got a couple of kids who are about to be 20 who are going to go there.
27:57
So you can see that St.
27:58
Cloud wanted some older defensemen coming in.
28:01
I'm sure Bob Motzko is going to want to do the same thing in his new job.
28:06
Either way, it's going to be interesting.
28:09
We've got so many things that come up.
28:11
We could have players decommitting, recommitting.
28:18
We could lose more players.
28:19
We have no idea what's going to happen there.
28:20
We don't even have any idea who Motzko is going to go after for his own staff.
28:25
Is he going to bring his own guys from St.
28:27
Cloud in?
28:27
Is he going to bring some new guys in?
28:30
Do we have any clue on that, guys?
28:34
I don't think so.
28:37
I would be surprised if Bell moved on, just because he is under contract, from what Veegs says, at least.
28:45
I'm using Veegs as my source here.
28:48
I have the contracts.
28:50
They're guaranteed to be paid through April 30th of next season.
28:55
He's a valuable guy.
28:57
And I think that he would be somebody.
28:59
But you never know.
29:00
You just don't know.
29:01
I think the other interesting question will be, how is Motzko going to recruit at the U?
29:08
Because the fact is, is that most of the players that ended up at St.
29:13
Cloud are not guys that really the Gophers pursued with a lot of zest.
29:18
There's some here or there, but it's sort of a different category of players that you're going after.
29:24
And how is he going to address that?
29:27
Because when you suddenly...
29:30
I've always said that there's kind of like this siren song when you're a Gopher head coach, because now all of a sudden you see all this talent in front of you that is at your fingertips.
29:41
And it's like, you know, but you want to build the right team, you know?
29:45
And you're not building an All-Star team, you're trying to build the best team.
29:49
And sometimes that means that you're not grabbing just talent after talent.
29:53
You have to blend it all together.
29:55
So it'll be interesting to see, you know, from that perspective, how he's going to try to build the Gopher program and whatever image he has.
30:05
What do you think, Veegs?
30:05
You think it's a good idea to maybe keep Bell on as an assistant coach is kind of a bridge between the two staffs?
30:12
And, you know, I don't think Guentzel will be here, but Bell might not be a bad idea.
30:18
Well, I think Bell is so plugged into the recruiting scene after, you know, being a scout with Pittsburgh and having his kid go through the Bantam, you know, program Edina.
30:28
You know, there's just so much knowledge there and so much hustle into his recruiting that I think it's a good idea to keep him on board.
30:37
I have a feeling that Motzko's recruiting style is a little bit different than Bell's.
30:42
That's going to be something they're going to have to talk about and hammer out.
30:46
But, you know, Bell's a hustler, so he's a good person to have on staff, and he could be a good alum to have to connect to people.
30:53
Because, you know, there aren't a ton of alumni from Minnesota who are in great positions to be assistant coaches at the U.
31:00
You know, you want some guys who have got some experience coaching, and, you know, there just aren't a ton of Minnesota guys out there who have that experience.
31:10
No, there's not at all, so.
31:13
Well, before we get going, we still got a lot to talk about and get some questions to get to.
31:17
We need to hear from our sponsor, who we haven't heard from in a few weeks since we haven't had a podcast in a few weeks, so here we go.
31:25
Vintage mnhockey.com is a proud sponsor of The GPL Podcast.
31:30
Well, what is Vintage MNHockey?
31:32
Well, it's kind of the place to get all of your history of Minnesota hockey, from the pros to the minors, the collegiate teams to even the high school teams.
31:42
All information about any of those teams can be found on Vintage mnhockey.com.
31:47
They also have great interviews with some historical Minnesota hockey figures, like John Mayessich and Lou Nani, Glenn Sanmore, some of the greats of Minnesota hockey.
31:57
So make sure you check out those interviews.
31:58
It's a really great thing.
32:00
But as I always say, I think my favorite part is the store.
32:04
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32:11
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32:18
So make sure you visit vintagemnhockey.com and follow them on Twitter at VintageMNHockey.
32:26
Okay, boys.
32:27
Well, Hammy, not that we haven't had enough to talk about this week.
32:31
Coach Motzko is going to have a few holes to fill in his roster.
32:36
And both guys, he's already coached this year on the junior team.
32:39
Lindgren and Mittelstadt.
32:41
Lindgren gone last week, Mittelstadt gone just yesterday.
32:44
Those are big losses.
32:48
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
32:50
Lindgren, that to me was a mistake.
32:54
I don't think that that's like an overly damaging thing.
32:58
I mean, obviously, it's going to hurt in the short term somewhat.
33:03
But he wasn't one of those guys that was great on both ends of the rank.
33:06
I think that his physicality and maybe some of his defensive play was pretty good.
33:12
But I don't know that he was ever going to be a great offensive defenseman.
33:16
So I think that they can probably figure out and find, maybe from a team approach, they can handle that.
33:24
Obviously, you're not going to replace a talent like Mittelstadt.
33:28
There's nobody you're going to bring in now, either in the pipeline or late in the game as a late commit that's going to match that talent.
33:37
That one hurts a little bit more.
33:38
I can't blame him for doing what he's doing, especially when you're going to a, let's face it, a shit team in Buffalo and you have an opportunity in front of you to play on the pro level, on the NHL level.
33:51
So I can't blame him.
33:53
I don't think he was ready per se, but it doesn't matter what I think or what any of the fans think.
33:58
It's a matter of is that NHL team willing to sign them and give them an opportunity?
34:03
And apparently they are.
34:05
So best of luck to them and hopefully it works out well.
34:10
Veegs, Lindgren and Mittelstad.
34:13
Ouch.
34:15
Yeah, I mean, those are two pretty key players.
34:18
When Minnesota was playing St.
34:20
Cloud after getting beat pretty good on the, I think it was a Saturday night, they had a team meeting on Sunday.
34:27
And Lucia turned to Lindgren and Mittelstad to kind of spark the team.
34:30
And they came out and had one of their best performances of the year to beat St.
34:34
Cloud.
34:35
And after the game, Motzko said Lindgren was just the player Minnesota needed to flip the tide on that series.
34:43
And they're going to be missed.
34:46
Do I think those guys are going to step in the NHL right away and be successful?
34:50
Doesn't look like it.
34:51
You know, it's a big leap to go from college hockey to the NHL.
34:55
And it's even bigger when you're, you know, 19, 20 years old.
34:59
So I think it's going to be a tough challenge for those guys to be professionals.
35:02
I think they would have been benefiting from another year of college hockey.
35:07
So they'll take their punches next year.
35:11
Lindgren signed an ATO, so he's not even getting that year burned.
35:15
Mittelstadt, hard to argue when they do burn a year of his contract, so he gets more money sooner.
35:20
But at the same time, those guys are going to have a tough time next year.
35:24
They are going to have a tough time.
35:25
But I think, Hammeh, I think what makes the loss even worse when you look at somebody like Mittelstadt is that we didn't have a lot of offense this year.
35:39
If Sheehy, Novak, Pitlick, if those guys would have had a normal progression from the previous year, I don't think missing Mittelstadt would have been as big of a deal.
35:53
But now they struggled, didn't really improve this past season, and we don't even know if those guys are going to be around next season.
36:01
Well, I would suspect, I don't know that there's going to be anybody that's going to be banging down their doors after the year that they had.
36:09
They weren't bad, bad, but certainly given what we saw from the previous year, you know, you expected a lot more of these guys, especially somebody like Sheehy.
36:18
I kind of wonder just from conversations of some of these guys just didn't approach this season the right way.
36:26
You know, sometimes guys get a little bit, I don't want to say lazy, but you know, they don't maybe necessarily have the same focus because they feel like, hey, I had a kick-ass year last year.
36:37
I'm just going to, you know, roll out on the ice and I'm going to have the same results and it doesn't turn out to be like that.
36:43
So hopefully whatever happened for them this year, they've learned from it and they're going to use this off season to, you know, use that as kind of their motivation this off season to have a much better year next year.
36:56
I do think it was difficult on Sheehy and Novak this season battling through their injuries.
37:01
You know, Sheehy had a back surgery this summer, late in the summer, that, you know, cost Zach Parisi about four or five months of his season, whereas Tyler Sheehy tried to play right through it.
37:13
He didn't miss a practice hardly and Tommy Novak coming off ACL surgery in the middle of the last season, you know, come back less than nine months and try to play, then have an upper arm injury where he's got a cast on, you know, affecting the ability to take draws the second half of the year.
37:32
You know, those are two pretty important players that are just, you know, walking wounded for the team.
37:37
Hard to know, you know, how much blame to pin on those guys because they're trying to play through injuries for their teammates and I don't think there was a lot of scoring sitting on the bench.
37:48
Well, it doesn't help when you have a senior like Bristead who basically doesn't even show up, so.
37:55
Basically didn't show up.
37:57
Right.
37:58
He was a ghost.
38:00
And if it wasn't for his effort and some of his bad luck, he probably should have been sad a long time ago.
38:08
But you see him busting his butt out there and clearly a few times he was snake bit, but why?
38:17
He just got to cash in on some of those and he just couldn't do anything this year.
38:21
And it killed the team.
38:22
Because you're thinking just a couple more goals by any of those guys and they're in the tournament.
38:27
So who knows?
38:32
Probably who knows?
38:33
We got a bunch of questions from Twitter, guys.
38:35
And if you're listening live, you have any questions for us, just use the hashtag GPL Podcast.
38:39
I'm just going to start with the most recent.
38:41
Todd Johnson wants to know, and I thought this is at both of you.
38:45
What do you think the big difference will be between Lucia coached the Gopher team and a Motzko coached Gopher team?
38:51
What do you think, Veegs?
38:53
What's the first thing we'll see is the difference between how they coach the game or coach the team?
39:00
Man, it's hard to know exactly what the differences are, because I feel like philosophically, they're similar in how they see the game.
39:07
They want to see a lot of offense.
39:09
They want to see their defenseman getting involved in the rush.
39:12
You know, they want to see power plays perform.
39:17
I think the one thing you might see is more fire.
39:20
You're going to see a guy who's a little more intense on the bench, and hopefully that'll rub off on the players, and they'll be a little more fiery as well.
39:30
Hammeh, any thoughts on how the game is going to be coached between the two coaches?
39:36
Yeah, I mean, I think that I would agree with Veegs on that.
39:39
I think that probably the big thing will be, you know, how maybe, I guess what I'm curious is how Motzko is going to recruit with regard to, now that he has probably a little bit broader ability to get some of the higher end guys.
39:56
I'll be curious to see how he approaches that.
39:58
I think that just from conversations, that I think that they'll probably try to get a little more physical than what we've seen.
40:07
I think that they'll probably be a little bit more of a focus, not that they didn't focus on the four, but I think it's a player's character, kind of what their makeup is as a player, you know, how do they handle adversity?
40:25
Because I think one of the things we've seen is some of these kids come in, they've always been primetime players, they've always been the star player at their high school or wherever they've come from, and then they come here and you don't have star player roles up and down the lineup.
40:40
Some of these guys have to play roles that are more grittier and tougher, and some of these guys simply don't have the tools for it, they don't have the makeup for it, and it'll be interesting to me to see if they start to adapt their approach to kind of find guys that maybe fit those roles a little bit better in, but still contribute things from a talent perspective.
41:02
Nathan Home wants to know, bigger perceived knock on Guentzel in the eyes of the administration.
41:09
Was it the ties to Lucia, or lack of proven track record as a head coach?
41:14
I'll throw that one at you, Hamme.
41:16
He hasn't been a head coach in a while, but you think it's more of the ties to Lucia and maybe how the defense wasn't so good this year?
41:24
No, I think that they have enough respect for Don Lucia, that that wouldn't be like the back breaker for him.
41:32
I'm sure that a lot of it is just when you look at another candidate, like I mean, if it's Bob Motzko, I mean, he does have head coaching experience on the college level, quite a bit of it, and obviously we know that Mike Guentzel does not have that.
41:47
I think when I look at the candidates, to me, Guentzel was at worst the second guy for the job.
41:56
I mean, mainly because he has built teams on his own.
42:01
He has helped build this program.
42:03
He has a track-breaker.
42:06
He may not be the head guy, but if I was going to say anything, that would probably be the back-breaker for his situation, is just not having the same level of head-coaching experience on the D1 level as Bob Motzko.
42:23
What do you think, Veegs?
42:25
Well, I definitely think there is some recency bias against Guentzel.
42:30
When you involve a committee that all they hear from the public is how bad the defense has been this year and what a bad state the program is, I think that probably factors into their thinking.
42:43
That's probably too bad for Guentzel because he's done such a good job over his career at Minnesota.
42:48
But I think that definitely plays into it for them.
42:54
Okay, let's scroll through and the craze wants to know, over or under 3.5 points for Casey and Buffalo the rest of the year.
43:03
How does Casey do his first few games for Buffalo?
43:05
What do you think, Veegs?
43:08
I think he's going to get a couple of points.
43:10
They're going to put them with some good players.
43:12
I don't think they're going to stick them at center and make them do all the work.
43:16
At this time of the year, the games don't mean a whole lot, so it's probably going to be closer to the 4-4 Debutee League than NHL playoff games.
43:28
What do you think, Cami?
43:30
I think Old Metal said it can make any noise out there in Buffalo these last few games.
43:36
What do they have?
43:37
Like six games left, something like that?
43:38
I don't know.
43:39
I don't even know.
43:41
Yeah, he'll probably get a few points, but who knows?
43:44
I mean, it's kind of hard to envision.
43:46
It's kind of weird.
43:46
Sometimes you think that a guy is not going to do it as much because he just left college and he didn't have a great college year.
43:52
He did pretty solidly and he had his moments where he was really shining, but it wasn't consistent.
43:58
So you think, oh, he's going to go off to NHL and probably struggle.
44:01
But then sometimes you see these guys just suddenly blow up and you say to yourself, why the hell did he do that on a college?
44:08
So it'll be interesting.
44:10
I don't know.
44:11
We'll see.
44:12
Tim Havke from three hours ago, he says, do you think Gentsel's tweet tonight about the best thing about today is Jake's assist is foreshadowing of things to come and he's not coming back?
44:22
Well, obviously he's not coming back, but I think Gentsel probably knew for at least a day that he wasn't going to be coming back.
44:30
Any thoughts on that, guys?
44:34
I have no idea what his plans are.
44:37
I mean, obviously I wouldn't blame him one bit if he never looked back and just said whatever, go screw yourself after all the time I put into that program.
44:49
So I don't know what he'll do.
44:52
Whatever he does, I certainly, obviously I would love for him to stick around and be a part of building things to the level we want it to be, but if he doesn't, you certainly can't even blame him for not doing it.
45:07
Totally lost you there.
45:08
Kind of lost you at the end there, Hamilk.
45:10
Oh, I'm sorry.
45:11
Nah, you've been having kind of issues all night.
45:13
At least that's what I've been hearing, cutting out a little bit, but we're good.
45:18
Tommy D.
45:19
Martino, Veegs.
45:20
Who's going to score now that Casey's gone?
45:24
I would say we'd like to see the Sheehy and Novak's come back, but that has been kind of the concern with Casey leaving.
45:32
We have some scorers on the roster.
45:35
Sheehy and Novak, if they're healthy and come back, those guys can score.
45:39
Norman's shown in the past that he can score.
45:42
Pitlick, when he's going, he should be a dangerous player.
45:45
He was probably the biggest mystery in me all season.
45:49
He's a player that was so dependent on playing with Mittelstadt this year.
45:53
I'm not sure what was going on there.
45:55
That would be a big key for Motzko to unlock, is to figure out how to get him productive again.
46:00
Maybe we see Pitlick at its center next year.
46:03
McManus is a player who really flashed at the end of the season as a legitimate threat.
46:10
So he would have benefited by playing junior this year, but because of some departures, they brought him in.
46:15
And he's a player they're going to have to count on him for scoring.
46:18
Coming in, Blake McLaughlin, he's been a scorer in the USHL, and I think they'll look for him to be a scorer at Minnesota.
46:28
Let's temporarily go back a few weeks here.
46:33
And obviously when we, our last podcast, we were still about to go to Penn State.
46:39
And since then, or actually, I think we did have a podcast.
46:42
I can't even remember anymore.
46:44
All I know is our last one was in February.
46:49
Veegs, the end of the season, not so good.
46:53
You know, they had to wait and wait.
46:54
And it looked like they were in.
46:55
And the sequence of events that happened to knock them out and to keep Duluth in by one one thousandth of a point, RPI or whatever it was, the sequence of events that happened a week ago during the, you know, the tournaments all over the place, it was just phenomenal.
47:18
It was unprecedented.
47:21
It definitely was unprecedented.
47:23
I'd been looking at how many at large teams had ever been outside the, you know, the cut line to make the tournament.
47:30
And the most had been three and that happened twice.
47:32
And that was back when Atlantic Hockey team, CHA, got bids from their tournament.
47:37
So that's two, you know, right there that you'd expect.
47:41
But there had never been this many.
47:43
And you just had to think going into it that Minnesota was going to be in.
47:47
But a lot of the teams that we expected to get, you know, their conference tourneys that already had at large bids all kept dropping.
47:55
And as games ticked off one by one, it just kind of felt like it was going to happen.
48:01
You know, you just kind of, once you identified this 1-in-64 scenario going into the night, you're just like, it's going to happen.
48:08
This is definitely going to happen.
48:09
You just see the games end and you can hear some cheers and excels because that's where I was.
48:16
People were following along and it was just kind of one of those Greek tragedies.
48:21
It's just like, that's going to happen.
48:23
And it did.
48:25
It was odd because, you know, it literally came down to that last night.
48:28
And what was it?
48:29
Six games?
48:30
Only one had to turn out, you know, the Gophers.
48:33
If one of those games turned out the way it needed to go, Gophers were in.
48:38
Yeah, once Duluth lost, you know, it was almost a sure thing that Minnesota was in.
48:43
All six games had to go.
48:44
I was looking at the odds.
48:45
If you were to do a 16 parlay, you put down, you know, 100 bucks, you would have got 51 back on your on your butt.
48:53
Five grand.
48:55
Oh, geez.
48:57
Hammy, thoughts on the most bizarre ending to a season we've ever had, I want to say.
49:05
Yeah, I mean, I guess it just goes to show you, you can't let your own destiny get out of your hands, right?
49:11
You kind of have to take the destiny and just make it work for you.
49:14
And I just feel like it's unfortunate that they kind of let things happen the way they did in those last few series with Penn State.
49:23
And, you know, you always look back, we always talk about when you look back on the season and you say, if we had won just this one game, we would have got in or we would have been in a different position or whatever.
49:34
And you never know when that game happens when it's in the midst of the season.
49:38
But you certainly can look back on those games and say, yep, if we had played a little better that night and we came out with a win, it would have done a world of good for us, you know, on our opportunities.
49:47
So it's always interesting to kind of look back in hindsight, pick those one or two games where you say that's what did us in.
49:56
And lo and behold, instead of five Big Ten teams getting into the tournament, four of them did.
50:02
And boy, Figs, three of them have made the Frozen Four.
50:08
And people are like, what?
50:14
This is pretty good for the Big Ten to get three teams into the Frozen Four.
50:20
Yeah, I kind of saw this coming.
50:22
You looked at the brackets and Michigan has been a really good team for the second half of the year.
50:27
And I thought they had the easiest regional out of all the four.
50:31
You looked at Ohio State and the way they had been playing the second half of the season.
50:36
They were going to be a tough team to go against because they're so tough defensively, they're physical, and they've got some scores.
50:44
And then Notre Dame, they're just a tough team.
50:47
I think they dipped a little bit in the second half of the season, but they've got probably one of the best goalies in college hockey.
50:54
And they play such a tough style where they are so defensively focused that it doesn't take a lot of mistakes for them to capitalize on.
51:04
And lo and behold, those three are in, and then the last team you get in that large bid comes out of the region of death.
51:13
And that was a region of death.
51:15
I thought it was the toughest group.
51:18
And obviously got thrown all wacky when Frank Sartori's Air Force team came in and upset St.
51:25
Cloud.
51:28
I believe the first time a 16 has ever defeated a one, or is it the second time?
51:32
Has a 16 ever beaten a one?
51:35
I think then Mankato.
51:36
Mankato, yes.
51:38
RIT.
51:39
Yeah, RIT beat them, so the second time.
51:41
Everyone always loves to say, oh, it was Holy Cross.
51:44
No, Holy Cross wasn't.
51:45
That was a 15-2.
51:47
So people can shut up about that.
51:50
But we've been talking about the people being angry about the Big Ten, blah, blah, blah.
51:55
And I don't think, Hamme, we've ever been angry about the quality of play.
52:01
We knew the quality of play was going to get better.
52:04
We knew some teams had some down years.
52:06
I don't think that was the basis of the anger.
52:09
I may have played into it from the fans, but we knew this league was going to be good.
52:15
It just took a couple of years.
52:17
But the addition of Notre Dame was a brilliant move, and I think it really helped the entire league this year to have Notre Dame in the league.
52:26
Well, I mean, I think if you were to go back and look at some of our posts or some of our podcasts back in the day when we first started talking about this stuff, I think we all said that, look, we know that at the start of the Big Ten, they're not going to be the best conference.
52:43
You know, because we had basically an expansion team in the conference for the Penn State.
52:50
We knew that there are a couple teams that were kind of on a lull like Ohio State and Michigan State.
52:56
And of course, we never expected Wisconsin and Michigan, especially Wisconsin, to go around the tank the way they did.
53:05
So even that was a little bit unexpected.
53:06
But we all knew that that was probably going to happen early on in a conference like the NCHC was going to be better off in the early going because they had more stable teams that were already kind of on a high note.
53:20
But I think as we all talked about in a matter of five years or so that that was going to start to change because when you have big schools with big pockets, they have a lot of money at their disposal that are willing to put into their programs, that's eventually going to pay dividends.
53:36
And I think that that's kind of what we started to see.
53:38
And I think that that's what's going to be happening moving forward.
53:41
Doesn't mean there's never going to be a down year in the Big Ten, but I think that you're going to start to see them consistently be in the conversation as either the top conference or in the top two conferences in all of college hockey.
53:55
Well, I tweeted out a couple of days ago the expenses for D1 hockey programs.
54:00
And if you look at the top 15, all seven Big Ten schools are in there.
54:06
You know, those schools are making a commitment to winning.
54:09
And the top three are Madison, Notre Dame and Minnesota.
54:13
And those schools want to be successful at hockey and they're putting the money where their mouth is.
54:18
And I'm sure that comes into the factor for Motzko to coach at Minnesota.
54:22
You know, St.
54:23
Cloud is not on the most stable footing financially.
54:26
So, you know, in addition to the contract offer that he's going to get, the resources that he's going to have to have success are going to be much more than St.
54:35
Cloud, who is not even in the top 15 for expenses.
54:38
Well, we knew expenses were going to go up.
54:40
I mean, just the travel expenses have really increased.
54:44
The travel that they're investing in.
54:46
Yeah, sure, they're paying for charters rather than buses.
54:49
But you know, the food and the amenities that these players get at the Big Ten schools is so much better than they can get at St.
54:57
Cloud in smaller schools.
54:59
Definitely true.
55:00
I mean, just and you know, we've talked about people being angry for so long and I kind of thought even this week, I just think, you know, for me personally, I just kind of missed the road trips and you know, people coming to Mariucci, going to Duluth or Bemidji and the closer schools and those games meant something.
55:20
You could still do it now, but it's just not quite as fun as it used to be, you know, because those games don't mean as much.
55:27
I think that might be some of it.
55:30
But like you said, Veegs, over the years, it's just people need to get over it.
55:35
A lot of things happened all at once, you know, the reseeding and the money and the ticket.
55:39
I mean, just everything kind of happened at once.
55:42
But now with the new staff, Veegs, we just have to try to plow through this and you know, embrace it as much as we can.
55:51
Well, I think if fans want there to be better atmosphere at Mariuchis, they're going to have to embrace it and get over it.
55:57
You know, it's not going to go back.
55:59
So you're going to lose your road trips, maybe invest in your road trip to try to go to Ann Arbor or South Bend and see a game there rather than, you know, trying to go to a couple of road trips.
56:09
And at the same time, they are still scheduling Minnesota, Duluth, St.
56:13
Cloud, North Dakota.
56:15
Those teams are on the schedule.
56:16
Sure, there won't be as intense series because there aren't conference points on the line, but they still do have those opportunities for fans.
56:24
Heck, people go to Vegas if they want, try to scalp a ticket for a couple of hundred bucks.
56:29
And maybe one of these days, Minnesota can beat Duluth again.
56:35
Because I don't remember the last time they beat Duluth.
56:38
Maybe one of those might have been the North Star Cup, the first one.
56:44
It just seems like it's been forever since they've beaten Duluth.
56:49
Oh, boy, guys, well, if North Dakota is looking for a coach, Scott Sandlin's probably should be number one on their list.
56:55
He's probably been the most successful of the coaches in this region for the last couple of years.
57:01
Oh, he definitely has.
57:03
And let's kind of talk about that.
57:06
What do you think?
57:07
Do you think Duluth's got a chance next week there, Hammeh?
57:13
Well, I mean, I think Airways got a chance when you only have to win two games, right?
57:16
But I do think that, you know, it's going to be a tough one.
57:21
I think Ohio State, you know, I think is really playing well.
57:25
I mean, they've kind of really heated up at the right time.
57:28
And I think that they're playing really good hockey.
57:31
I kind of expect that Notre Dame is going to get to the final.
57:35
I just I don't know.
57:36
I just think that's going to end up being an all Big Ten final this year.
57:40
Veegs, you know, Denver came in playing extremely well.
57:43
They took care of Penn State and Ohio State just shut them down.
57:50
Yeah, that's probably the least Denver's had the puck in the season.
57:54
You know, I thought Ohio State did a great job having long shifts, lots of possession.
57:59
You know, one of the things watching Minnesota this year is you saw if you have an offense that has so many won and done opportunities, it just kind of carries over into your defensive zone where you're tired and you're chasing the puck all the game.
58:13
In that Ohio State-Denver game, you saw Ohio State possess the puck a lot and take it to the net and take it between the dots and play the way they had to play.
58:22
I thought Dakota Joshua flashed at times in big games last year.
58:27
I think he's kind of been hit and miss this season.
58:29
He played a great game against Denver and he's a player that can really push them over the top next weekend.
58:37
How much is it going to freak the people out if it isn't all Big Ten final?
58:40
There's going to be a lot of pissed off people, aren't there?
58:45
I don't know.
58:47
I don't know.
58:47
Are people going to be pissed anymore?
58:50
People overreact about everything.
58:53
And I'll probably be out on Twitter trying to encourage them to overreact.
58:59
Yeah, you're trying to get them to act up.
59:01
Yeah, I try.
59:04
So Vig, are you picking an all Big Ten final, too?
59:07
Oh yeah, I'm picking all Big Ten.
59:10
It's kind of easy when half the bracket's Big Ten teams as is.
59:13
But I think Ohio State's going to be a tough team to get out of the tournament.
59:19
And it's hard to know with Duluth.
59:21
They looked so bad in the NCHC championship.
59:24
They did.
59:25
Like they just got frustrated.
59:28
They took bad penalties.
59:31
They did a lot of things that frustrate Gopher fans.
59:34
They shoot pucks off the rush that have no chance of going in.
59:38
They change on their power play at the wrong time and don't communicate.
59:43
There's passes going back and they're chasing the puck the whole game.
59:47
It was hard to watch.
59:49
They got it back for the NCAA regional.
59:53
At the same time, I think they got bailed out a little bit by Minnesota State having an awful second period where they didn't get a shot on goal.
1:00:00
It was brutal.
1:00:02
That kind of let them back into it.
1:00:04
Then they didn't have to play St.
1:00:05
Cloud in the final.
1:00:06
They have to play Air Force, who is a hard team to play against, but it's not St.
1:00:10
Cloud.
1:00:11
It's not a team that's going to roll out double digit goals on every line.
1:00:16
I think they got out of the regional a little easier.
1:00:20
They're going to have two tough games if they even get past Ohio State.
1:00:23
They'll definitely have the crowd on hand, at least cheering for them.
1:00:27
Just like it was in 2011.
1:00:29
I mean, you just look at the teams.
1:00:31
We got three of the teams that were in the 2011 Frozen Four right back there at the X this year.
1:00:36
The only difference is Ohio State instead of North Dakota.
1:00:41
Yeah, but I don't think you'll have the non-UMD fans pulling for them, quite like they did back then.
1:00:47
I think a lot of fans in the Metro think UMD's gotten a little too high and mighty since they got their first title.
1:00:54
There won't be quite that same enthusiasm for them as there was that time.
1:00:59
Yeah, I hope so.
1:01:00
Are you going to be heading down there for the Frozen Four there, Veegs?
1:01:03
That's the plan.
1:01:04
I'm planning on being there for both days and looking forward to it.
1:01:08
I haven't covered a final Frozen Four before, so it should be fun.
1:01:12
I'm sure there will be a lot of interest around the coaching situation here still.
1:01:17
Actually, my first one I covered was that 2011 one.
1:01:22
I thought it was fun.
1:01:24
At the time, it was fun to see Duluth win, get one.
1:01:28
It was a thrilling game in overtime.
1:01:31
It was exciting for me because it was my first one.
1:01:33
I did end up covering the Tampa one.
1:01:36
This year, I just decided, you know what?
1:01:40
I don't want to go down there.
1:01:44
Maybe next time.
1:01:46
Who knows?
1:01:47
It's fun to cover.
1:01:49
Covering at the X, you're obviously familiar with it, but when we covered in Tampa, Tampa's building, great location for the fans.
1:02:00
Tampa's building for covering, not as great.
1:02:03
Press box, tiny.
1:02:06
No places to shoot for photographers.
1:02:09
It was just really goofy.
1:02:10
But the X is a great place for this Frozen Four.
1:02:14
I wish they would get more of a regular rotation with it because, you know, it has been a little while, so.
1:02:21
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens with Frozen Fours and Regionals as they decide what they're going to do going forward with the format.
1:02:28
But Excel is a great place to cover games and it's a great place for fans to go.
1:02:32
I know a lot of the NCHC fans enjoyed going there for their tournament, even though the attendance really wasn't that much more.
1:02:40
I think the experience was better for everybody.
1:02:43
Yeah.
1:02:44
All right, Hammeh, you got any final thoughts here?
1:02:46
Or you guys have got anything else to talk about?
1:02:49
I mean, we've covered a lot tonight.
1:02:51
No, man, I'm wiped out.
1:02:57
Did you get it all out of your system, though?
1:03:00
Yeah, I'm good.
1:03:02
Like I said, I'm totally on board with the next head coach and I hope he does great.
1:03:08
I will always support the Gopher program.
1:03:10
Obviously, the program is the most important thing.
1:03:12
Not any one coach or any one person.
1:03:15
So that's ultimately what it's all about.
1:03:18
Yeah, I was I was a Gentsel guy, but I have I'm with I'm with you, Hammy.
1:03:22
We need to get behind Motzko and we'll see how he puts his staff together and we'll see how it all comes together next fall.
1:03:30
Veegs?
1:03:31
Yeah, I just think there's very few people that could take this job.
1:03:35
And I think Motzko is one of them.
1:03:37
He's definitely qualified to do it.
1:03:39
And it'll be interesting to see what he does in the next couple of weeks here with his staff.
1:03:43
And I'll be at the press conference on Thursday.
1:03:46
And I'm sure the athletic will have plenty of coverage of the Gopher Hockey world.
1:03:53
I'll have an article coming out on the facilities that Don Lucia will be fundraising on here soon.
1:03:58
And then next week at the Frozen Four.
1:04:00
And of course, you just did your yearly article on, you know, ticket scans, didn't you, on you for JPL?
1:04:08
Yep.
1:04:08
So the numbers for all the games and actual attendance is on there.
1:04:13
I think a big issue with it this year was they had such a lower number of season tickets that they had to move single game tickets like they never have before.
1:04:22
And it took until I think the Ohio State game for them really to do that.
1:04:27
And you saw the boost in ticket scan for that one.
1:04:30
I think if Minnesota is going to solve their attendance issue down the line, they're going to have to figure out how to get new fans who don't know anything about the old WCHA.
1:04:39
And getting these groups is a great way to do that.
1:04:43
It's interesting.
1:04:44
We had some people complaining, well, why aren't you guys covering Lucia change and stuff like that?
1:04:48
And you clearly said, Veegs, what are we going to say that 15 other outlets aren't going to say about the Don Lucia changing?
1:04:58
But one thing I like is that you do write those different articles that you know what?
1:05:02
No one else is talking about.
1:05:05
And that's the kind of content that people come to GPL for.
1:05:09
Because is anyone talking about ticket scan besides maybe Molesky in Wisconsin?
1:05:14
No, that's about it.
1:05:15
And it's a worthy topic for people like Minnesota Duluth.
1:05:19
They have ticket scan problems just like Minnesota.
1:05:21
So something I've looked at a little bit and probably will do something here.
1:05:27
Early next season.
1:05:30
Do you guys see a reason we need another show next week?
1:05:34
I don't know.
1:05:35
We'll see what happens, dude.
1:05:38
What will happen to the assistant coaches to talk about who the hell it is?
1:05:42
I think I might be up for that.
1:05:46
Either next week or the week after we can talk about the Frozen Four and talk about making some assistant coaches and if anything else changes.
1:05:52
So we won't leave this closed for the last show of the season.
1:05:57
We might still pop in here but we did cover a lot tonight.
1:05:59
And like you said, a lot could still change.
1:06:03
I would love to talk about where does Guentzel end up if he ends up?
1:06:08
I've been hearing even rumors that Patoni might be going after the St.
1:06:12
Cloud job.
1:06:14
So a lot of interesting things out there.
1:06:19
But you know, remember you can always follow Hammy on Twitter at Hammy Hockey, Vegoe at eVegoe on Twitter and of course at The Athletic.
1:06:29
And he does great coverage there.
1:06:32
Boy, we covered a lot this week.
1:06:34
A lot of changes.
1:06:36
We think it's all good.
1:06:37
Get behind the new coach folks.
1:06:41
Thanks for listening.
1:06:42
We'll be back next week or won't we?
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